Fedora 20, "Heisenbug," Now Available in Beta Release

The Fedora Project is excited to announce the beta release of Fedora 20, code-named "Heisenbug." A community-produced, free, Linux-based operating system, Fedora 20 features some of the latest and best of what the open source world has to offer.

The Fedora Project comprises a diverse global community with a common mission: the advancement of software freedom. The community’s most anticipated product is the Fedora distribution, an open operating system released by the project approximately every six months representing the work of thousands of contributors.

Linux enthusiasts are encouraged to download the beta release of Fedora 20, take it for a test drive and help identify items that may need attention before Fedora 20 is generally available. With the beta release, the software is feature complete but may have some bugs. Real-world testing and reports from users are vital to help identify any new or undiscovered bugs so that they can be addressed before wider distribution.

As the next iteration of Fedora’s leading edge distribution, Heisenbug enhances integration with virtualization and the cloud, supports ARM as a primary architecture, and includes a host of additional ease-of-use improvements.

Fedora 20 also coincides with the 10th Anniversary of the first official Fedora release, then called Fedora Core 1, which was announced on Nov. 6, 2003. Much more than the name has changed in the 10 years since Fedora Core 1, with Fedora emerging as an active and vibrant open source community that produces tailored operating environments (spins) for nearly a dozen use cases, from musicians and gamers to teachers and hardware designers.

What’s New in Fedora 20
First and foremost, we are pleased to announce that, in keeping with Fedora’s commitment to leading edge open innovation, ARM is now a primary architecture. While Fedora has supported a number of hardware architectures over the years (with x86/x86_64 being the default for the majority of Fedora users), the ARM team has made massive strides over the past year. The technology already dominates the mobile market and shows great promise for the server world as well, hence Fedora’s adoption of the architecture to satisfy end users and developers targeting the ARM platform.

Cloud and Virtualization EnhancementsOS Installer Support for LVM Thin Provisioning – LVM has introduced thin provisioning technology, which provides greatly improved snapshot functionality in addition to thin provisioning capability. This change will make it possible to configure thin provisioning during OS installation.

VM Snapshot UI with virt-manager – While QEMU and libvirt are fully capable of performing safe virtual machine (VM) snapshots/checkpoints, a simple, discoverable UI did not exist previously. This feature adds a UI to virt-manager, simplifying the VM process.

Developer Goodies
Fedora features a host of new features and updated packages to interest developers using a wide variety of languages, including Ruby on Rails 4.0 and Perl 5.18.

Maturity/Advanced FeaturesNetworkManager Improvements – Users can now add, edit, delete, activate and de-activate network connections via the nmcli command line tool, and support for bonding and bridging interfaces is now included, improving usability for enterprise and virtualization users.

No Default Sendmail, Syslog – As systemd continues to mature, the systemd journal now takes its place as the default logging solution in place of syslog, while Sendmail is no longer installed by default.

If you are interested in being more deeply involved with Fedora, we want you on our team! You can contribute to the Fedora Project in many ways other than bug reporting – the Fedora Project Team is always looking for translators, testers, content creators, marketers, designers and so much more. Whatever your skillset, we would love to have you involved – find out more at http://join.fedoraproject.org.

The Fedora Project is a Red Hat-sponsored community project. For more information about Fedora, please visit the Fedora Project homepage.